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ADDRESS 



OF 



HON. HERBERT S. HADLEY 



AT A MEETING OF THE 



KANSAS CITY 
HISTORICAL SOCIETY 



KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI 
APRIL 19th, 1913 









JAN 23 11)8 ~ 



a 



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It was Napoleon who said that history is a fiction that 
is agreed upon. But it is, as I understand it, one of the laud- 
able objects of this Association to make the history of this 
community and this State a correct record of human events. 
And no question is of greater interest and importance than 
one which relates to the history of our country and the 
operation of our system and form of government. 

The history of the nation can be understood only as we 
understand the history of the states, and the influences 
and conditions that brought about their creation and de- 
velopment. 

It has often seemed to me that we who live in that part 
of the State of Missouri that is named for the State of Kan- 
sas do not consider in its proper importance the history of 
the State in which we live and of which we are a part. The 
influences of trade and the conditions of transportation 
cause us to turn our faces towards the West. But we 
should realize that we are vitally affected in our social, in- 
dustrial and political affairs by all that affects the life of 
the State under whose laws we live and to which we must 
render an obedience. And in order that we may effectively 
co-operate to promote the public welfare, we should under- 
stand the influences that brought about the settlement of 
Missouri, her part in the life of the nation and the genius 
of her institutions. 

And whether we are Missourians by birth or Mis- 
sourians by adoption, we have reason indeed to feel proud 
of that state which we call ours. With the possible ex- 
ception of some of the thirteen original states, there is none 
that has been, or is today, more typically American; none 
that has had a more marked and lasting influence upon 
our national life and character. 

While Missouri has always been conservative and df>- 
liberate in action, never impulsive or hysterical, her his- 
tory is the history of striking contrasts and apparent con- 
tradictions. The soil of Missouri was added to our domain 
as a part of that great empire which Thomas Jefferson, 
the great exponent of Democratic doctrines, secured for 
the nation when acting in accordance with Federalistic 
principles. And it was the privilege of Missouri to bring 
into the Union the last of those states formed from that 
territory which belonged to the American Colonies at the 



establishment of American independence. Maine entered 
the Union upon the shoulders of Missouri. 

From the time that Missouri applied for admission as 
a state, her history was interwoven with the history of that 
great conflict whose final precipitation the admission of 
Missouri did so much to postpone, and whose final culmina- 
tion the sons of Missouri did so much to bring about. A 
Northern state in location, Missouri became a Southern 
state in its institutions and its sympathies. And the first 
Constitution adopted by the people sanctioned African 
slavery, and provided that no free negro should ever be per- 
mitted to reside in the state. But when human ingenuity 
could no longer ward off the inevitable, when compromise 
could no longer stay the hand of fate, Missouri, by over 
eighty thouasnd majority, decided to remain loyal to the 
Union, to the Stars and Stripes. Missouri, then, in pro- 
portion to her population, furnished a larger number of 
soldiers to the armies of the North and of the South than 
any other state in the Union. The bravery of the sons of 
Missouri, who offered up their lives in devotion to the 
cause for which they fought, is proved by the lives which 
they so freely gave from Ft. Donelson to Appomatox Court- 
house. And what a galaxy of glorious names can Mis- 
souri claim among those men who lived and wrought dur- 
ing those anxious years; who won the praise of their own 
generation and the admiration of posterity. 

Grant and Sherman, whose fame and achievements are 
now the common glory of the entire country, were citizens 
of Missouri before the beginning of the Civil War; the one 
a farmer, the other the manager of a street railway system 
of the city of St. Louis. To these names can be added those 
of Blair, of Sigel and of Nathaniel Lyon, whose untimely 
death made the battle of Wilson's Creek a tragedy to the 
Federal cause. 

It was due to the courage, the foresight and the unfail- 
ing purpose of such leaders that not only Missouri, but the 
Trans-Mississippi country was saved to the Union, and the 
probable success of the Confederacy, which such a loss 
might have meant, was thereby rendered impossible. And 
among those who fought beneath the Stars and Bars, the 
names of Missouri's sons are hardly less distinguished. 
Francis M. Cockrell, old "Pap" Price and Joe Shelby, the 
last a general at the age of thirty-four, with a martial 
spirit unsatisfied by four years of bitter war, are names 
of men whose deeds will be remembered so long as human 
bravery is sung in song and told in story. 

Missouri, like the Kentucky mother, said to her sons at 
the beginning of the Civil War, as she placed in their hands 



the swords their fathers had carried in the war with Mexico : 

"I hope that you will draw this sword in be- 
half of the country and the flag for which your 
fathers fought, but for one side or the other in this 
great conflict, draw it you must." 

The Dred Scott decision, sustained eventually by the 
judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States, was 
first rendered by a Missouri Judge, announcing a doctrine 
which shocked the moral sensibilities of the people of the 
North and of the East, and did much to render inevitable 
the irrepressible conflict. And yet, the State that had once 
denied to free negroes a domicile within her domain, that 
first gave concrete expression to the doctrine that a black 
man had no rights which a white man was bound to re- 
spect, was the first of the states in which the institution of 
African slavery had been recognized, to abolish that -in- 
stitution by constitutional amendment or legislative enact- 
ment. 

Missouri, to complete the record of striking contrasts, 
Missouri which voted by eighty thousand majority to stay 
in the Union at a time when the question was a political 
issue, after a brief period of Republican rule following the 
close of the Civil War, swung back into the Democratic col- 
umn, taking her position along with Arkansas and Mis- 
sissippi in the intensity and reliability of her devotion to 
Democracy. And, then, after a period of forty years of 
Democratic rule, Missouri calmly and complacently parted 
company with the Solid South; calmly and complacently 
took her place at the head of the Republican column, and 
there she proceeded to stay until she decided to change back. 

In no other stats in the Union have political contro- 
versies been characterized by more intensity of feeling; in 
no other state of similar population and wealth have the 
two leading political parties been more equally divided in 
strength. The political, history of the State has iDeen charac- 
terized by excesses of partisan prejudice and intensity of 
controversy which have been neither a source of satisfac- 
tion nor benefit to our institutions. 

But, notwithstanding the bitterness of political con- 
troversy and its consequent influence upon the legislation of 
the state, it has affected but little, if at all, the social, re- 
ligious, professional and commercial life of the common- 
wealth. Northern courage and Southern chivalry have vied 
with each other in the courtroom, in the store, in the home 
and in the church in maintaining and regarding the 
amenities of life. Children of Northern parents have mar- 
ried and been given in marriage to children of Southern 
parents, and bitter opponents in politics have worked to- 



gether in complete harmony in every other department of 
human activity and thought. The stormy Petrel of prejudice 
and controversy has stirred alone the waves of politics, leav- 
ing undisturbed the even current of our social, professional, 
religious and industrial life. And Missouri has learned by 
actual experience that no political party is entirely bad, 
and that no political party can claim a monopoly of honesty 
and virtue. 

And yet, this record of over three-quarters of a century 
of striking contrast and rapid changes has been accom- 
plished without the suggestion of inconsistency, and with- 
out any loss of reputation for good sense and conservatism. 
The truth of the matter is, that when the people of Mis- 
souri have thought that they had occasion to change their 
minds, they have done so, without unnecessary agitation or 
dis.turbance. When they have thought they had no occasion 
to change their minds, they have remained of the same 
opinion. 

But the one particular in which Missouri has had a 
marked influence upon our national life; the one particular 
in which Missouri illustrates the operation of forces which 
have contributed materially to our national development is 
as a pioneer influence in the winning and the development 
of the West. The true significance of the history of the 
State is in connection with this great national movement. 
Our history cannot be understood, except as we understond 
the work of the American pioneer. And the development 
of our national life, the growth of our nation and its in- 
stitutions, its present and its future, will not be understood 
except as we understand that westward movement which be- 
gan during the Revolutionary War at the shores of the At- 
lantic and ended three-quarters of a century later at the 
shores of the Pacific. 

The able and dignified gentlemen, who, in pow^dered 
hair and knee breeches, declared for us our national inde- 
pendence, realized most vaguely, if at all, the possibilities 
of national development. The genesis of the American 
Revolution was not the desire for national independence, 
but a demand for the rights of the American Colonists as 
English subjects under English law. The occasion of the 
convening of the first Continental Congress in 1774 was the 
general dissatisfaction over the provisions of the Boston 
Port Bill, and the second Continental Congress, meeting- 
after the battles of Concord and Lexington, declared that the 
Colonies had "no wish to separate from the mother coun- 
try, but only to maintain their charter rights." 

The soldiers who followed Gates and Schuyler in New 
England and New York, ivho rode with Marion and Sumpter 



in Georgia and the Carolinas, and those who dared all and 
endured all under the leadership of Washington, were doubt- 
less concerned but little, if at all, with the future develop- 
ment of the nation for which they fought. 

But the operation of those forces which were to change 
a collection of Colonies stretched along the sands of the 
Atlantic into a continental empire whose shores are washed 
by the waves of two oceans, had begun even before that 
shot was fired at Lexington which rang 'round the world. 
While Washington and his army were fighting the battles of 
the Revolution against the English and the Hessians, there 
was being fought out upon the Western slopes of the Alle- 
ghenies another war against the Indians and the wilder- 
ness, the result of which was as important for our national 
development as was the struggle for national independence 
itself. Long before the Declaration of Independence some- 
one had found the way to the West. And while the struggle 
for national existence was being fought on the Eastern 
slopes of the Alleghenies, that Westward movement had 
begun which was to produce the typical American and en- 
large, far beyond the capacity of the men of that period to 
appreciate or understand, the possibilities of national great- 
ness. And during the closing years of the Revolutionary 
War, those who had crossed the Alleghenies into the Valley 
of the Mississippi were not only able to fight successfully 
their own battles against the Indians of the wilderness, but 
were able to render material assistance in the final contest 
of the War of the Revolution. For it was they who at King's 
Mountain slew the gallant Ferguson, and completely de- 
stroyed his army, and it was from their ranks that most of 
Morgan's men were recruited when that grizzled old bush- 
fighter smote Tarleton so roughly at the Battle of the Cow- 
pens. These two victories drove Cornwallis into his fortifi- 
cations at Yorktown and made it possible for the great com- 
mander to win at last the struggle for national independence. 

With the close of the Revolutionary War, the real West- 
ward movement of our population began. The true career 
of the American people as a race of empire builders dates 
not from the founding of Jamestown and Plymouth, but 
from the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. The early 
settlers were simply European sentinels standing guard over 
the treasure of Continental America, which they neither 
comprehended nor appreciated. They looked backward to 
the source whence they had come, rather than forward to 
the conquest and subjugation of a mighty empire whose 
extent and richness they neither realized nor understood. 
It was not until national independence was at last a reality 
that the American people began to feel that they were 
masters of a new continent and that to them belonged the 



future. From that time American development was to be- 
g-in, and it was to proceed as naturally and inevitably as 
the planets in their courses. The soldiers of the American 
Revolution, hardened by years of exposure, accustomed to 
the free life of the camp and of the field, turned naturally 
to that unknown West, the roads to which had been blazed 
by such hardy pioneers as Boone and Harrod and Robert- 
son and Sevier. 

A century and a half had been necessary for the de- 
velopment of the American Colonies as they existed at the 
declaration of American Independence. Within three-quar- 
ters of a century after the close of the American Revolu- 
tion they had extended their dominion, their customs, their 
institutions and their laws to the shores of the Pacific. This 
mighty pilgrimage of a race, this subjugation and occupa- 
tion of a continent, is unparalleled in the history of the 
world. In the accomplishment of this mighty work was 
developed a new character in the world's history — the Amer- 
ican. The history of the nation can only be understood in 
the history of the West. The hardy pioneer, who, with ax 
and rifle, blazed the pathway of emigration and civiliza- 
tion into the Valley of the Mississippi and subdued it to his 
control, was also the pioneer American. He was neither 
Puritan nor Cavalier ; he was an American, 

While the South was the mother of the West, yet those 
who led the pilgrimage of this sturdy race were not of the 
gentry or the ruling caste of the Southern States. From 
Virgmia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania came repre- 
sentatives of that fierce, restless race, the Scotch-Irish, the 
mild-mannered Quaker, the English, the German, the S2otch, 
the Irish and the Huguenot, who in the course of a genera- 
tion were to be moulded, in the fierce struggle for exist- 
ence that they waged against the Indians and the wilder- 
ness, into the peculiar and characteristically American type. 

No fiction can ever surpass, in the intensity of its in- 
terest, this vast heroic drama of the West. The history of 
the occupation of the West is the real American Iliad. If 
you would sing of our "arms and our heroes" you must in- 
clude the American pioneer. How tame in comparison be- 
come the stories of ordinary war and adventure. The 
courage and daring of the age of chivalry in insipid by com- 
parison. The West was won by a race of giants to whom 
fear was a stranger. The pathway across the Alleghenies 
into the Valley of the Mississippi never led backwards. 
Those strong-limbed, bold-hearted, determined people be- 
longed to that class who had come to stay. Three genera- 
tions had produced in the free air of the new continent a 
man different from Old World's types ; he was tall of frame 
and with abundant brawn, and there belonged to him the 



heritage of courage and unrelenting determination ; thin of 
face and sharp of countenance, strong of will and fierce in 
passion. Though given at times to listless idleness, he was 
yet able to show a fierce intensity of purpose and a most 
sustained energy of action. His was the day of buckskin 
and linsey-woolsey, of rifle and ax, of flat-boat and birch 
canoe; of homes built of logs and slabs, and fields tilled 
with both rifle and the hoe. Let me give you the story of 
one man and one community as typical of this period and 
of this hardy race who left home when there was no need 
of going, and who resolved never to surrender the land 
which they had come to occupy. 

In 1779 James Robertson, in the Wautauga settlement 
of North Carolina, gathered about him a party of 380 per- 
sons, men, women and children, and started for the West. 
He uttered these simple, but prophetic words: "We are the 
advance guard of a civilization and our way is across the 
continent." The women and children, 130 in number, with 
a few men, went by boat, scow and canoe, in the winter- 
time, down the bold waters of the Halston and the Tennes- 
see. The rest traveled as best they might, over 500 mileb 
of trace, from North Carolina to Tennessee. Of the entire 
party, 226 got through alive to the site of the present city 
of Nashville. Of those who traveled by water, only 97 got 
through alive, and 9 of these were wounded; one was 
drowned, one died of natural causes and the rest were killed 
by the Indians. Among those who survived the journey was 
Rachael Donelson, who died a few months too early to be- 
come the first lady of the land as the wife of President 
Andrew Jackson. In November, 1780, less than a year after 
the party had started westward, there were only 134 per- 
sons left alive out of the original 380. The Indians killed 
the settlers and the settlers killed the Indians. Of the set- 
tlers, 39 were killed in sixty days. The spring of 1781 found 
only 70 persons left alive, but when a vote was taken as to 
whether they should stay ur return, not one voted to give up 
the fight. The course of empire in America was, as I havo 
said, along the pathway that never led backAvard. In 1791 
there were only 15 persons left alive out of the 380 who 
made this westward pilgrimage, and there had been only one 
natural death among them. 

In such a settlement, among such a people, there was no 
such thing as a hero; all were heroes. No master of fiction 
could portray the story of their struggle and their hard- 
ships. One man, after having been shot and stabbed many 
times, was scalped alive and lived to .loke about it; a little 
girl was scalped and lived to forget about it. An army of 
Indians assaulted the settlement, and fifteen men and thirtj^ 
women beat them off. One of the women, a forgotten 



heroine, moulded bullets throughout the night, and on the 
next morning gave birth to a son. This was the ancestral 
fibre of the West. And yet, in the fierceness of their strug- 
gle against the wilderness and savage foes, they did not 
forget their mission. In ten years after they had first cut 
away the forest they were founding a college and establish- 
ing a court of law. Thus it was that the homes and the 
graves of the West grew ; and thus it was that our national 
type was developed. 

Of such a stock were the men and women who followed 
the Boones, Bentons, Harrods, McAfees, Finleys, Bryants, 
Stewarts, Robertsons and Seviers in the winning of the 
West, and the story of its settlement and subjugation is 
told in the lives and labors of those men and women who 
established the states of Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri. 
We owe much of our national territory and national charac- 
ter to these bold pioneers who waited for no policies, no pur- 
chases, no leaderships, but pressed on, rifle and ax in hand, 
to discover and subdue the West. That was the day of the 
founding of the American aristocracy, of the birth of the 
American type and the beginning of the American charac- 
ter. 'If we would study and understand our American his- 
tory and institutions we cannot disregard the American 
pioneer. Particularly do his achievements enter into the 
settlement and the building up of the states of Kentucky, 
Tennessee, Missouri and Texas. The fathers followed 
Boone through the canebrakes of Kentucky, or fought at 
King's Mountain; the sons marched south with Jackson to 
overcome the Creeks or defeat the British at New Orleans. 
Pushing on in their ceaseless yearning for the frontier 
they builded a new state beyond the Mississippi, and then, 
advancing into the Southwest, they died at the Alamo or 
charged to victory at San Jacinto. 

The purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 
marked an epoch in American history. The land, however, 
which lies between the Mississippi and the Pacific was 
dedicated to the American people by laws as immutable as 
the laws of nature. When it was transferred to the dominion 
of the new Republic the same great work of discovery, ex- 
pansion and conquest began there that had been carried 
on since the close of the Revolutionary War in the territory 
that lies between the Mississippi -and the Alleghenips. 
Rogers and Clark, Zebulon Pike and Kit Carson were to the 
Far West what the Boones, the Harrods, the McAfees and 
the Kentons were to Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri. In 
1792 Kentucky became a state of the American Union; in 
1797 Andrew Jackson, as its first United States senator, sat 
in the halls of the American Congress. In 1812 Missouri 
was organized as a territory, and in 1820, a state lying 



wholly west of the Mississippi became a part of the Federal 
Union when Thomas H. Benton took his place as a senator 
from the State of Missouri. 

In order that the next quarter of a century of Ameri- 
can history may be properly understood, it should be kept 
in mind that Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri were then 
regarded as the West. In our time, by reason of the 
memories of the Civil War and the influences that it left 
upon our national life, we are apt to fail to understand that 
formative period of our national life and history. During 
that time controversies in national politics were as pro- 
nounced between the East and the West as between the 
North and the South. Henry Clay was known to his genera- 
tion, not as a Southern statesman, but as "Harry of the 
West." The victory of Andrew Jackson over John Quincy 
Adams was a triumph of the West over the East, and the 
two presidents, whom the Whigs elected to office, Harrison 
and Taylor; one a resident of Ohio and the other of Louis- 
iana, were both chosen and regarded as representatives of 
the West. 

The same character of men who had settled and de- 
veloped the states of Kentucky and Tennessee and Missouri 
became the most numerous and the controlling element in 
the populations of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. And during 
the next quarter of a century these states, acting generally 
in harmony, rose to power and developed a strong, aggre- 
sive national sentiment in our public affairs. During the 
early periods of the building up of Kentucky and Tennessee 
the bonds which connected them with the national govern- 
ment were regarded with indifference and at times almost 
in a spirit of antagonism. But finally the tide of national 
sentiment set strongly towards the Union, and the War of 
1812 developed, not only the solidarity of the West, but also 
established the solidarity of the American Republic. 

With the development of the national sentiment there 
came a realization of the manifest destiny of the American 
people to establish a continental empire and carry their in- 
stitut^'ons, laws and civilization to the shores of the Pacific. 
And Missouri became, in its turn, a vanguard and outpost 
of civilization as Kentucky and Tennessee had been before 
her, and Virginia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina before 
them. The Missourian became the pioneer of the West. 
From the time that Zebulon Pike. Kit Carson, Jebediah 
Smith, Jim Bridger, Bill Williams, William Bicknell and the 
other pathfinders, scouts, trappers, traders and Indian fight- 
ers marked the pathway of travel and of commerce and of 
conquest across the Western plains and mountains, as their 
ancestors had blazed the first trace through the gans of the 
Alleghenies, the Missourian was always upon that firing line 



which is the protest of civilization against the wilderness. 
In that ceaseless yearning for the frontier which has drawn 
the star of empire westward from the Mississippi to the 
Pacific, the Missoiirian has always been at the head of the 
procession. For nearly forty years Missouri stood as an 
outpost of civilization, reaching out into the unknown and 
the undeveloped West. From her borders stretched those 
two great trails of Western travel, trade and conquest 
along which were to march those hardy hunters, trappers, 
traders, Indian fighters and soldiers who were to bind to 
the national domain the Trans-Mississippi country by ties 
stronger than those of treaties or of laws. The Missourian 
was the pioneer of the West. 

The Oregon Trail, along which were to march the men 
who were to do more to win for us the great Northwest than 
our statesmen or our diplomats, started at our western bor- 
der and ended at the Pacific. The Santa Fe Trail, along 
which Alexander W. Doniphan, the one man Abraham Lin- 
coln said he had ever met who came up to expectations, was 
to lead his band of Missourians to add to our territory a vast 
new empire in the Southwest, started within our domain 
and ended in the land of the Mexican and the Spaniard. 
And the sons of Missouri have taken the lead and done well 
their work in the felling of the forests, the cultivation of the 
soil, the digging of the mines, the conducting of the com- 
merce, the writing of the constitutions and the laws and the 
holding of the offices in the states that lie between the Mis- 
sissippi and the Pacific. 

It is almost a platitude to say that a period of history 
speaks through the medium of its great men. Leadership 
in the life of a people consists not only in directing their 
thoughts and activities, but also in expressing that which 
the people of any particular time may feel and believe. At 
a time when the representatives of the Eastern states in 
our national Congress were proclaiming the worthlessness 
of the Trans-Mississippi country and the impossibility of 
it supporting any considerable population, the representa- 
tives of Missouri were proclaiming with confidence its 
richness and fertility, the manifest destiny of the American 
people to subdue and occupy the American Continent from 
ocean to ocean and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. 

In 1816, in a public address in the city of St. Louis, 
Senator Thomas H. Benton said: 

"The magnificent valley of the Mississippi is 
ours, with all its fountains, springs and floods, and 
woe to the statesman who shall undertake to sur- 
render one drop of its water or one inch of its soil 
to any foreign power." 



The representatives of Missouri were vigorous and per- 
sistent advocates, in so far as the Trans-Mississippi country 
was concerned, of the policy of claiming everything and 
conceding nothing. And had their advice and counsels pre- 
vailed the slogan of "54 40 or fight" would not be today an 
unsatisfactory memory in our history, but would have 
marked the northern limits of our territory. 

In advancing such a policy they acted in response to the 
feelings of the people whom they represented and of those 
influences which had carried the American people in their 
desire for new lands, new homes and new adventures ever 
onward towards the setting sun. And in their advocacy of 
a national policy which would secure as our national domain 
the Trans-Mississippi country, thsy were not indifferent to 
the possibilities of commercial and industrial development. 
In 1852, speaking at a meeting of citizens of an unincor- 
porated village on these bluffs which overlook the confluence 
of the Missouri and the Kaw, where now stands that splen- 
did city in which we meet tonight, Thomas H. Benton ut- 
tered the prophesy which has found its splendid fulfill- 
ment at the present time : 

"Here where these rocky bluffs meet and turn 
aside the sweeping current of this mighty river; 
here where the Missouri, after pursuing her south- 
ern course for nearly two thousand miles, turns 
eastward to meet the Mississippi, a great manufac- 
turing and commercial community will congregate, 
and less than a generation will see a great city." 

As a representative of and expressing the feelings of 
the state of which he was a part, many of his predictions as 
to the greatness of the Trans-Mississippi country and its 
future development may have seemed extreme and over- 
wrought when judged by the standards of his time. And yet 
he expressed the conviction, ingrained in the very being of 
the people of this state, as to our manifest destiny, and that, 
beyond all doubt, the coming years were ours. In comment- 
ing upon his predictions as to the development of the Trans- 
Mississippi country Theodore Roosevelt says in his "Win- 
ning of the West:" 

"More clearly than any other statesman of his 
time he beheld the grandeur of the nation loom 
vast and shadowy through the advancing years." 

There was another principle, other than that of the 
pioneer spirit, which was manifest in this westward move- 
ment, which found expression in the settlement and the de- 
velopment of Missouri. That was the spirit of individualism. 
The period of the winning of the West was the golden age 
of individualism. A man with his rifle and his ax was his 



own sole producer and consumer, dependent upon no one for 
aught that contributed to his comfort or his existence. The 
hard, lonesome, dangerous life of the pioneer developed, ^'n 
an exaggerated form, a self-reliance and self-confidence. 
Every man was a fighter, and every man felt himself capable 
to command. The theory of socialism had no place in the 
winning or the development of the West. The home and the 
individual was the unit of society, and not the organization 
of the community. That which each made by his labor, his 
own foresight, courage, skill or energy was his own, and he 
stood ready to defend it, if need be, against all the world, 
though he paid the price of his life in the struggle. The 
right of others to share equally in the products of his labor 
or achievements was as abhorrent to his sense of justice and 
of right as would be the claim of another to the special 
privilege of levying tribute upon his labor and achievement 
through the possession of money or of power. As against 
the assertion of either claim he would have fought with that 
unrelenting determination and undaunted courage with 
which he helped to win the fight for national independence 
from the British and the wealth of a continent from the In- 
dians and the wilderness. In the present day we can turn 
with profit for our inspiration and ideals from the tawdry 
list of our modern captains of industry to those captains of 
enterprise and achievement who made possible by their dar- 
ing, initiative, leadership and individualism our commer- 
cial, industrial and national greatness. 

It had been the lot of Missouri, in securing admission 
to the Union, to bring about a compromise with reference to 
the institution of African slavery, which postponed for the 
lifetime of a generation the inevitable conflict as to its con- 
tinued existence. And in bringing this controversy to a 
final issue it was again the lot of Missouri to play an im- 
portant part. The abrogation of the Missouri Compromise 
and the establishment of the doctrine of squatter sovereignty 
has been generally attributed by historians to the political 
ambitions of Stephen A. Douglass to secure for himself the 
support of the South in his ambition to be nominated and 
elected president. But recent investigations have, in my 
opinion, made it entirely clear that Douglass was forced by 
the logic of events and by political conditions to take the 
position that he did in this controversy. The influence that 
brought about the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise 
and the opening up of Kansas and Nebraska to African 
slavery came from political controversies within the state 
of Missouri and the conflicting ambitions of Senators Atchi- 
son and Benton to represent this state in the United States 
Senate. And a strongly contributing influence towards the 
bringing about of this result was that pioneer spirit which 



found expression in the winning of the West and the settle- 
ment and development of Missouri. The men who had been 
the pioneers in the carrying of English civilization across 
the Alleghenies and the building of a commonwealth west of 
the Mississippi had looked with eager eyes for years into the 
vast, rich domain beyond our western borders which was 
occupied only by the Indian, the coyote and the buffalo. 
They were not satisfied with the carrying out of our domin- 
ion and our commerce to the shores of the Pacific, they 
wished to see the Trans-Mississippi country settled and ob- 
cupied by Americans and builded into new commonwealths. 
And so strong was this feeling that Benton, opposed though 
he was to the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise and 
the extension of African slavery, was forced into the ad- 
vocacy of a policy which would open up the Trans-Missis- 
sippi country to every white man who wished to enter it 
and occupy it. 

I cannot, within the proper limits of my discussion this 
evening, enter into a further consideration of the contro- 
versy that followed. In the trying years of the Civil War 
the contest for national existence absorbed and obscured all 
other national movements and influences. But when peace 
was finally established and the work of agriculture and in- 
dustrial and commercial development was again begun, the 
pioneer work and influence of Missouri continued through- 
out the Trans-Mississippi country. The prejudices and bit- 
terness aroused by Civil War drove many Missourians be- 
yond our borders, causing them to seek new homes and new 
opportunities for achievement in the undeveloped territories 
of the West. But irrespective of these influences, the old- 
pioneer spirit, which was manifest in the settlement of the 
state, continued to carry the stream of emigration to every 
state and territory between the Mississippi and the Pacific. 
Many times as I have gone into the different states that lie 
to the west of us I have been surprised to find what a very 
considerable majority of those who were prominent in the 
commercial, professional and official life of the community 
were former Missourians. In fact, I have been surprised to 
know what a large majority of good people we had left in 
the state when I found how many good people we had given 
to other states and territories. 

Let us hope that the glory of Missouri is not alone the 
glory that comes from things that have been done ; that her 
achievements are not as a story that is told. If she is to be 
true to her hopes and the dominant principle that manifested 
itself in her establishment and development, she must ex- 
ercise a pioneer influence in meeting and solving the social, 
industrial and economic problems of the present day. And 
in that great moral awakening which has swept across the 



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country, creating an increased interest in the duties of citi- 
zenship, causing the obligations of office to be placed above 
the influence of politics and patriotism to be placed above 
partisanship; in the working out of those great problems 
which, as the product of our complex, commercial civiliza- 
tion, confront the American people and demand solution to- 
day, Missouri has also been something of a pioneer. Let us 
hope that this work will continue and will not fail. -For 
what more fitting and proper than that this distinctly Amer- 
ican state, the center of our national domain, with institu- 
tions and conditions so characteristic of our national life, 
should be the leader in national thought and action in deal- 
ing with problems and evils which threaten, if they do not 
endanger, the security of our institutions and our system of 
government. For she represents in her industrial and in- 
tellectual greatness the interests of the North and of the 
South, of the East and of the West. Her greatness and 
catholicity in this regard but reflects the diversity of her 
climate, her resources and her soil. She has oats and barley 
on the north and corn and cotton on the south; she has 
steamboats along the east and prairie schooners along the 
west; she has millionaires and socialists and she can look 
upon both and be unafraid. She can give a World's Fair, 
surpassing in beauty, size and magnificence all former 
achievements, or she can furnish bob-cats and black bears 
in sufficient quantities and fierceness to satisfy the most 
strenuous demands of modern statesmanship. She can show 
you a soil unequaled in its richness by the Valley of the Eu- 
phrates or the Delta of the Nile, and beneath skies of Italian 
blue, in a climate that has sunshine enough for sentiment 
and snow enough for courage, she can show you fair women 
and strong men — ^the very flower and bloom of American 
manhood and Amerjcan womanhood. 



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